The problem of extracting signals from a noisy environment is well known in the signal processing prior art. The fundamental problem facing any receiver designer is how to improve the reception of a desired signal in the presence of unknown and undesired interfering signals, channel distortion, and thermal background noise.
In principle, this can be accomplished by signal processing. For example, consider a prior art multi-sensor receiver having an array of spatially-separated antennas which is receiving a desired signal from a first direction and interfering signals from other directions. By forming the appropriate linear combination of the antenna outputs, the signals arriving from the desired direction wilt be accentuated while signals from other directions are attenuated. Similarly, with single antenna receivers, notch filters can be used to place notches at the frequencies of narrowband interfering signals and other filter types can be used to equalize linear channel distortion. In both cases, the desired signal reception can be significantly improved by passing the received signal (or signals) through a linear combiner with proper combiner weights.
The basic problem is to set the combiner weights. If all of the parameters of the interfering signals are known, the proper combiner weights can be easily calculated. One approach in the prior art is for a transmitter to send a known signal over a channel. The known signal is sent at the beginning of a transmission, or intermittently in lieu of an information-bearing signal. In this manner, the receiver can be trained at the start of the transmission and the combiner weights updated during the transmission. Other embodiments of this approach transmit a pilot signal along with the information-bearing signal. The pilot signal is used to train and continuously adapt the receiver.
In the prior art, adaptive algorithms have also been used to learn weight settings for a linear combiner by exploiting some known characteristic(s) or quality of a desired signal that distinguishes it from unwanted interfering signals and noise.
There are a number of methods for accomplishing this. There is the Applebaum algorithm that maximizes the signal-to-noise ratio at the output to the adaptive array, and the Widrow-Hoff least-mean-square algorithm that minimizes the mean-square-error between the desired signal and the output of an adaptive array
Exact least squares algorithms which optimize deterministic, time-averaged measures of output signal quality have also been developed. However, in directly implementing an adaptive processor that optimizes any such quality measure, the receiver designer must have accurate knowledge of the cross-correlation between the transmitted and received signals. This requires close cooperation between the receiver and the desired signal transmitter, which cooperation may not always be feasible or present.
Alternatively, the receiver may not have the necessary control over the transmitter. This is the case when the receiver that must be adapted is not the intended receiver in the communication channel, such as in reconnaissance applications.
In applications in which a known desired signal cannot be made available by the transmitter to the receiver, the prior art teaches using a blind adaptation technique that exploits other observable properties of the desired signal or the environment in which the signal is transmitted. Prior art techniques for accomplishing this may be divided into three categories.
The first category is a demodulation-directed technique wherein a reference signal is produced by demodulating and re-modulating a processor output signal. This reference signal is then used as a training signal in a conventional adaptive processing algorithm. This technique relies on the demodulator re-modulator loop providing a very clean estimate of the desired signal. However, this requirement is not met until after the demodulator has locked onto the received signal. Until the demodulator does lock on, the reference signal estimate will generally be poor. For this reason, most demodulation directed techniques are employed as tracking algorithms only after a more sophisticated technique has been used to lock onto the desired signal.
The second category is a channel directed technique that exploits known properties of the receiver channel or environment such as the spatial distribution of the received signals. Knowledge of the receiver channel is typically used to generate and apply a reference signal to a conventional adaptation algorithm, or to estimate key statistics which are used to optimize the combiner weights. When applied to antenna arrays, most channel-directed techniques exploit the discrete spatial distribution of the signals received by the array, i.e., the fact that the received signals impinge on the array from discrete directions of arrival.
The third category is referred to as set-theoretic property-mapping and property-restoral techniques, wherein the output of the receiver is forced to possess a set of known properties possessed by the transmitted signal. Here, the receiver processor is adapted to restore known modulation properties of the desired signal to the processor output signal. Modulation properties are defined here as observable properties of the desired signal imparted by the modulation format used at the desired-signal transmitter.
The property restoral technique described in the previous paragraph has been successfully applied to adaptive signal extraction in both filters and antenna arrays and appears to have strong advantages over both the demodulation-directed and channel-directed techniques. However, this techniques still has drawbacks.
The above described techniques are described in greater detail in U.S. Pat. No. 5,299,148, entitled “Self-Coherence Restoring Signal Extraction And Estimation Of Signal Direction of Arrival”, issued Mar. 29, 1994 to Gardner et al.
However, there are shortcomings in all prior art techniques described above. Briefly, some feature or properties of a desired, received signal or the environment in which the signal is transmitted must be known and utilized in order to improve the reception of the desired signal in the presence of unknown and undesired interfering signals, noise and distortion. These include knowing the direction from which the desired signal is coming, knowing characteristics of the signal or receiver channel or environment, and using a pilot signal.
A technique for improving the reception of a desired signal in the presence of unknown and undesired interfering signals, channel distortion, and thermal background noise without having the shortcomings in the prior art described in the previous paragraph is taught in a paper by Brian G. Agee. “The Least-Squares CMA: A New Technique for Rapid Correction of Constant Modulus Signals,” Brian G. Agee, ICASSP 1986, Tokyo, pp. 953-956, a rapidly converging constant modulus algorithm (CMA) is disclosed that permits extracting FM, PSK, FSK and QAM communication signals from a highly corruptive environment without using a training signal. This paper describes a rapidly converging algorithm based on the method of non-linear least squares CMA for adaptive correction of constant modulus signals. However, the technique taught in this paper only works with constant modulus signals of the type identified above.
Thus, there is a need in the prior art for an improved technique for receiving and separating all types of signals, not just constant modulus signals, in the presence of unknown and undesired interfering signals, channel distortion, and thermal background noise.